The word "archaeology" has always been a bit mysterious to ordinary people, China has been a cultural power since ancient times, producing many unique cultures, but important cultural relics that mark the history have been taken underground by the rulers of that era in an attempt to continue to enjoy it in the afterlife. However, although there are many ancient tombs unearthed in the past, large-scale sites are rare, which also reveals the preciousness of the site.
In 1929, in The Yazi River in Guanghan City, Sichuan Province, a farmer Yan Daocheng stumbled upon a pit of jade tools while repairing fields. Yan Daocheng felt that this jade artifact did not look simple at all, it seemed to be very old, so he reported it to the local cultural relics bureau. The experts were taken aback when they saw it and immediately rushed to investigate.
Ge Weihan, director of the Western University Museum, and assistant Lin Mingjun formed an archaeological team to conduct a ten-day excavation near the jade artifact found in Yan's family. The harvest from the excavations was also spectacular, but the Sanxingdui site, which was first excavated in 1934, entered a state of secular stagnation and was not restored until after the 1950s.
Because at that time, it was recognized that the ruins of Sanxingdui could have such a huge scale, so they regarded the Moon Bay site in the north of Sanxingdui and the Sanxingdui site in the south as one site. In 1963, led by Feng Hanji, major museums participated in the re-excavation of the Sanxingdui site.
Excavations spanned more than 20 years and cleared up the remains of Neolithic sites. In addition, you have precious cultural relics, and tens of thousands of specimens have been unearthed. These cultural relics and specimens show the world the magnificent and splendid civilization of Sanxingdui, and then the archaeological work of Sanxingdui has also attracted the attention of the international archaeological community, but why did it suddenly stop excavation at this time?
In 1986, two rectangular artifact pits containing abundant treasures were accidentally revealed, and a large number of metal artifacts were unearthed. The types of bronzes unearthed in Pit No. 1 are human heads, human faces, human masks, etc., and these bronzes made according to humanoids look extremely strange.
The bronzes including the No. 2 pit soil include large bronzes, kong bi, birds, snakes, chickens, monsters and so on. Some bronzes are two or three meters high and weigh more than a hundred kilograms. They come in all shapes and have very peculiar faces. It doesn't look like a species on Earth. From form to volume, it was unique during the Shang Dynasty.
Among the many cultural relics, the most conspicuous is a bronze sacred tree with a height of 3.95 meters. It is the world's largest single bronze cultural relic, pushing the Sanxingdui culture to another height, and there has always been great controversy about the production of this bronze, and the process of cultivation, as well as the meaning of this pearl tree. But it is indisputable that this is a treasure unique in the world, and it cannot be measured in money.
The excavation of these sensational cultural relics also involves more mysteries, such as why the ancient Shu kingdom where Sanxingdui is located suddenly disappeared? At the same time, with the deepening of excavation, archaeological work is also more and more difficult, in order to better protect these precious cultural relics from being damaged in the excavation, so archaeologists decided to stop excavation, to the future technology mature and then restart, hoping that the Sanxingdui site can bring us more surprises in the future.